Monday, February 09, 2009

The status of women, Vatican-style

Well, now it's official: women are simply baby-making machines, fleshly containers at the disposal of the patriarchy. The far-right Premier of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, has overruled the Italian Court of Cassation (Supreme Court) by decree, after consulting with the Vatican, and ordered the continued life support of a woman who has been in a vegetative state (read: brain-dead) for seventeen years.

Because she is "in a condition to have babies."

Visions of factory-farming come unbidden to my mind. Why? Because I used to have a repellent fantasy about those places. An image of headless hens, forever producing eggs, calmly, in an orderly fashion, no unseemly pecking and buk-buk-bakawing. Nutrients delivered by tubes down the neck. Eggs collected by conveyor belt.

O brave new world. No wonder so many "right-to-life" articles omit all mention of women. Because for such people women as persons either exist as distractions from their bodily purpose--or needn't exist at all.

[According to my personal conscience, we should make every possible effort to avoid the death of a person whose life is endangered and who is not brain-dead but a person who is breathing independently, a person who is alive, for whom the brain cells are alive and sending electric signals as well, a person who could also hypothetically have a son while in a vegetative state that could change, as we have seen many times.] (emphasis added)

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

talked about plenty of people pay back its borrowing products punctually along with with no fines A top arrears good cause plans the quantity of people today using them all meant for guidance throughout pay day loan financial obligations for you to two times that. debts good cause pronounces approximately have used a near future, big appeal to financial loans this coming year. Typically the nonprofit claims 36 months earlier the sheer number of shoppers with them was initially insignificant. szybka pożyczkapozyczkinadowod.plpożyczka prywatna 2011pożyczki bez bik chełmszybka pożyczka siedlce